There is no amount of sonic pain that composer Christopher Lennertz won’t endure over his 30-year life. Eric Kripke, the current showrunner of The boys. Lennertz previously listened to endless amounts of boy band slop to write the Super-Sweet single “Rock My Kiss” for season 3 and forced herself to write the most sentimental song imaginable for Starlight’s pop star moment, ‘Never really disappear’ and now he’s back with Season 4’s “Let’s Put the Christ Back in Christmas.”
‘If I can say anything The boysit’s that we do our research,” Lennertz tells Polygon with minimal eye twitching.
Former fraternity brothers who went to Hollywood together with no money and a high tolerance for Taco Bell, Lennertz and Kripke have formed a fusion of minds thanks to years later. Supernatural And Revolution. So the writer knew he could give minimal instructions for what he wanted for the proposed Vought on Ice series in season 4, episode 3, “We’re keeping the red flag flying here,” says Lennertz.
“I literally get a short paragraph that says, ‘Homeland and Maeve come out as skaters sing a Vaught-produced song about war at Christmas, there’s a nativity scene and Jesus, and then everyone gets killed.’ And then it says something about ‘bringing Christ back into Christmas.’ That’s the whole job.”
The dynamic between showrunner and composer is more about vibes. When Lennertz began working on “Let’s Put the Christ Back in Christmas,” he began watching video after video of Ice Capades, Disney on Ice, Frozen on Ice and any other piece of source material that might inform the finished dance. “I knew I needed sleigh bells and I knew it had to be fast,” he says. Then the Vought of it all pours in, which Kripke is good for. Around the time Lennertz was pairing high notes with laser sounds, his old friend was sending him articles about the latest Christmas fear-mongering. Lennertz remembers the news from Candace Cameron Bure dealing with the Great American Family networkand her stance against the Hallmark Channel’s LGBTQ+ representation in Christmas movies, serving as an irked beacon for the satire.
“(Eric) has very little patience for that kind of silliness, just like me,” Lennertz says. “We are quite open people. So that was kind of our job from the beginning.”
Photo: Jasper Savage/Prime Video
Lennertz’s big dream for the series was to be bigger than anything The boys had done before. This wasn’t his first big showstopper song; Lennertz previously collaborated with musical legends Alan Menken and Marc Shaiman to expand Hawkeye‘s fake Avengers show Rogers: The Musical into an actual stage event for Disney California Adventure – and his thoughts immediately turned to Broadway to fill the vocal roster for the song. While the actors on screen are all skating professionals, the song touts Andrew Rannells (The Book of Mormon) as Homelander, Shoshana Bean (Hairspray, The kitchen of hell) as Maeve, and James Monroe Iglehart (Aladdin, Hamilton) as Jesus.
“I texted Eric and was like, ‘Can we shoot big Broadway stars and make this a big cameo?’” he recalls. “And as soon as I got permission to do that, I thought: Well, that must be Andrew. And then we got a Black Jesus in James Monroe Iglehart, who of course Vought later turns into a white Jesus, which is so Vought. (…) Luckily they all said yes. And they were all my first choice, every single one of them. I was really lucky.”
The finished version of “Let’s Put the Christ Back in Christmas” is painfully realistic, as far as schmaltzy skating dance numbers go. Then it just becomes… painful. You can watch the unblemished version above, but for the whole bloody affair, head over to Prime Video, where the first three episodes of The boys season 4 is currently streaming.